We invited photographer Nabil Rahman, the mind behind Pineapple And Milk, to go on guided walking tours with our Open City Fellows and create a video art interpretation of the riveting stories they wrote for Open City, our online magazine dedicated to telling the subterranean and rarely told stories of what it means to be Asian American in New York. Covering five Asian American neighborhoods and cited by The Wall Street Journal, NPR Marketplace, and MSNBC, our Open City Fellows have told the stories of halal butchers and undocumented immigrants, dumpling-makers and Chinese punk bands, Queens-based graffiti artists and the immigrant communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Open City Fellows Anelise Chen (Chinatown/Sunset Park), Rishi Nath (Richmond Hill) and Sukjong Hong (Flushing) read from and discuss their year of writing creative nonfiction about New York.
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Since 2004, Kundiman--an Asian American poetry nonprofit named after a genre of Filipino love song--has held poetry retreats for poets of Asian American descent. This special marathon reading presents some of the best emerging Asian American poets. Featuring Michelle Chan Brown (Double Agent), Evan Chen, Vanessa Huang, Cynthia Arrieu-King (Manifest), Jee Leong Koh (Seven Studies for a Self Portrait), Sally Wen Mao (Mad Honey Symposium), Alison Park, Purvi Shah (Terrain Tracks), R.A. Villanueva (Reliquaria), and Cathy Linh Che.
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Radical or pious? Defensive or confrontational? Halal, haraam?---How to be Muslim in America? This event examines contemporary Muslim American identity through different literary forms (theater, academic inquiry, hip hop) and class positions (black radicalism, assimilating lawyer). Ayad Akhtar won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play 旋风加速器xf5app, which played at Lincoln Center. The play follows Amir, an upwardly mobile South Asian corporate lawyer who finds himself hosting a racially tense dinner party in the Upper East Side. UC Irvine Professor Sohail Daulatzai’s Black Star, Crescent Moon re-presents the cultural politics of Black internationalism, re-imagining the shared history between Black Muslims, Black radicals, and the Muslim Third World. Legendary Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, the author of breaking poems--winner of the American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award--will read from sections of Sohail’s book. Moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lorraine Adams, the author of Harbor, a novel about an undocumented Algerian immigrant who ends up being surveilled as a potential terrorist.
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Three writers read metafictional, adventurous books whose prose is as experimental and fractured as their main characters’ identities. Manhattan Public Defender Sergio de la Pava originally published his "unapologetically maximalist" novel A Naked Singularity (Slate), a novel seemingly too ambitious and eclectic for mainstream publishing. The book was picked up by the University of Chicago, won a PEN Literary Award, and earned comparisons to Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Melville. The 678-page hysterical tome follows a public defender who’s the child of Colombian immigrants, as he takes readers through a tour of crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight. What would happen if you threw 150 years of the Philippines into the blender with Oscar Wao and Tristram Shandy? Possibly something like Miguel Syjuco’s Man Asian Award-winning novel Illustrado, which combines poetry, reviews, interviews, polemics, unreliable narration, and a main character whose name is—surprise, surprise—Miguel Syjuco. Eugene Lim’s layered, pixelated novel The Strangers collects a “literary cabinet of curiosities,” in the words of The Paris Review, including a young man vandalizing the posters of a paranoid nation, the search for the perfect T-shirt, and the missing person’s bureau of a giant cruise ship. Moderated by Ira Silverberg, former Editor-in-Chief of Grove Atlantic and NEA Literature Director.
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Drop by for a special workshop on what comics are and how you can make them--taught by one of the writers of the X-Men. Marvel Comics writer Marjorie Liu will guide you through how to write a comic book script. The author of paranormal romance and urban fantasy novels, Marjorie has written a number of high-profile comics, including Dark Wolverine, Black Widow, and 旋风专业版ios, for which she set history by writing superhero comics’ first gay wedding. Excelsior!
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Three writers capture the phantasmagoric side of the New Imperial Normal. Madiha Tahir speaks about her interviews with those Pakistani civilians directly wounded by drone attacks—the subjects of her forthcoming documentary 旋风加速器app官网. Jadaliyya co-founder Sinan Antoon reads from The Corpse Washer, his realistic and grotesque novel about a young man who washes corpses for a living. The novel "captures the experience of an Iraqi everyman who has lived through the war with Iran in the first half of the 1980s, the 1991 Gulf War over the Kuwaiti invasion, and then the 2003 war" (Three Percent). Said Sayrafiezadeh—named one of Flavorwire’s Top 100 Most Important NYC Writers—reads from Brief Encounters with the Enemy, a short story collection that chronicles the lives of alienated blue-collar men, earning a crust in dystopian war-time cities. This discussion will be moderated by Amitava Kumar, an AAWW Board Member and author of QAQGame免费加速器下载-QAQGame加速器绿色版下载v3.1 ...:2021-2-22 · QAQGame加速器绿色版,QAQGame加速器绿色版是西西小编特别为广大喜欢打网游的用户伔整理出来的免费加速器，该加速器可众让用户畅玩所有支持的大型网游，让用户从此告别延迟卡顿困扰！超,QAQGame免费加速器西西软件园下载地址., a passionate account of the surveillance state created by the war on terror as well as the artists who have begun to document it.
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Okay fine, you’ve read Persepolis and you’ve found yourself mildly aroused by photos of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but did you know we’re in a sorta golden age of Iranian American Writing? Time to pick up Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers, a path-breaking new anthology that collect stories set in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora by almost thirty authors, including Nahid Rachlin (旋风加速器.apk), Elizabeth Eslami (旋风加速官网), Maryam Mortaz, and Mehdi Okasi, who will read from their work.
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While we’re accustomed to thinking of Asian Americans as tech workers or model minorities, for most of American history, the Chinese immigrants who came to the United States did so as coolie laborers--essentially Asian slaves. They worked in mines, guano pits, and railroads. They were even lynched. Three authors discuss the often unknown Asian American 1800s. Tony Award winning playwright David Henry Hwang (旋风专业版ios, 旋风ios) discusses his play The Dance and the Railroad, recently revived at the Signature Theater, which tells the story of the impoverished and struggling Chinese laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad. A past winner of our Asian American Literary Award in Fiction, Brian Leung reads from his novel Take Me Home, a lyrical, heartfelt novel loosely based on the actual massacre of Chinese coal miners in 1885 Wyoming. In Karen Shepard’s new novel The Celestials?, a historical love story named after the antique slur for the Chinese, a local woman gives birth to a mixed-race baby after seventy-five Chinese immigrant workers arrive in North Adams, Massachusetts in 1870. The baby becomes a lightning rod for xenophobic fears in this heavily-researched novel that, in the words of Joshua Ferris, "works with the same primal heat as The Scarlet Letter and the same sympathetic scope as The Poisonwood Bible."
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Trevor Paglen once wrote: "The task of experimental geography is to seize the opportunities that present themselves in the spatial practices of culture." Or as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge writes in her new poetry collection Hello the Roses: "As shade trees grow and the orchid grows, space around reflects inspirative beauty." This reading presents four creators whose work interprets landscapes through fragments and collages. Berssenbrugge--an experimental poet who has won multiple NEA, American Book Awards, and AAWW Literary Awards--deploys labor-intensive appropriations of found texts to model the phenomenology of the New Mexico landscape. Born in Santa Fe, visual artist Nicola Lopez creates drawings, prints, and installation that represent the experience of contemporary signs of mobility, mapping, and constant communication--works that have been exhibited at the MoMA, LACMA, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ecologies become personal in Tamiko Beyer’s debut collection of eco-poetical poems, We Come Elemental; as poet Juliana Spahr writes, "Nitrogen, the plastics of the North Pacific Gyre, New Orleans, Saint Louis, lantern fish, muscles of the body, all of it is there, floating together in the body of the poem. "I want outside. / In the wrist is a bone like a boat. / I have been a long time out of water," writes Hawaii-based poet Janine Oshiro. Oshiro is the author of Pier, the winner of the first Kundiman Poetry prize and the recipient of the latest Asian American Literary Award for Poetry.
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“To tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns,” wrote Julian Wolfrey in Victorian Hauntings, “so that all stories are, more or less, ghost stories.” These three speakers talk about the disappeared, the missing, the haunted—whether because of the national security state or the more metaphysical lacuna of death. Guggenheim Fellow Catherine Barnett reads elegiac poems from her collection Into Such Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, in which she mourns the death of her two nieces. In the photo/sound installation Disappearance, photographer Diana Matar ruminates on the kidnapping of her father-in-law, Libyan opposition leader Jaballah Matar, and his likely incarceration by the Gaddafi regime. Cristina Lee will discuss her work with the Visible Collective and connect her own family's parallel history of internment during WWII with those communities hit by the post-9/11 security state.
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Four writers discover love—with an edgy and cross-cultural twist. AAWW Board member Anne Ishii discusses her work on the new Picturebox comics collection, The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame: Master of Gay Erotic Manga, a landmark collection of gay Japanese BDSM comics. Rahul Mehta reads from his debut short story collection Quarantine, the winner of the Asian American Literary Award. The book’s a buoyantly humorous and sexy portrait of openly gay Desi men seeking to manage both their relationships and the sometimes disapproving attitudes of their families. The child of a Polish socialist and a Chinese mother, Thad Rutkowski reads vignettes of edgy and cross-cultural love from his Asian American Literary Award-nominated collection Haywire, a wistful and whimsical book that led Ed Lin to call him “the original language gangster.” Moderated by poet Monica Youn, whose National Book Award-nominated collection Ignatz transmuted scenes of cold eroticism into the figures of George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat.
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In the age of 21st-century globalized metropolises of Asia, "the city" has come to mean not just a space but a temporality—an almost unreal, science-fictional vision of utopia or apocalypse. Tash Aw’s Booker Prize longlisted novel Five Star Billionaire chronicles one of the most populated cities on earth, Shanghai—where "New China" is a euphemism for constant impermanence. "Every village, every city, everything is changing," one character says. "It’s as if we are possessed by a spirit—like in a strange horror film." Taipei-born, Malaysia-raised and England-educated, Tash Aw is one of the the most prominent writers in Southeast Asia. In Manil Suri’s The City of Devi, Sarita struggles to find her husband in dystopian Mumbai just a few days before nuclear holocaust. The Washington Post calls it "The best sex comedy of the year about nuclear war between India and Pakistan." Jess Row’s forthcoming novel Your Face in Mine, set in Baltimore and Bangkok, imagines a future where "racial reassignment surgery" makes identity a matter of choice. Moderated by Pratt Institute associate professor Youmna Chlala, an artist and writer whose video installations of Beirut and Cairo have recently been shown at Art In General and the Rotterdam Film Festival.
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Did you know that a little-known law requires the government to imprison 34,000 immigrants everyday? Or that the Obama administration is on track to have deported more than two million immigrants—more than all deportations before 1997? Join us for an eye-opening discussion about the limits of the post-9/11 anti-immigration state and how its array of police interventions and prisons have affected communities of color. The author of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization and Colorlines.com publisher Rinku Sen discusses our broken immigration system, one that shames undocumented migrants as “illegal” and sends thousands of children to foster homes by shattering immigrant families. Jon Pineda reads from his novel Apology—in which an immigrant transient worker named Shoe is falsely implicated in a crime but ends up going to jail anyway. A deeply empathetic, lyrical novel about silence and guilt, Apology tells the story of the sacrifice of two immigrant families raising the next generation.
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It’s Saturday, which means you’re free from The Grind, also known as the Salt Mines, The Hustle, Punching-In, The 9-to-5. Novelist Alexander Chee emcees a lineup of writers talking about their worst office jobs: 旋风加速官网下载ios founder Stephen Elliott, memoirist Elizabeth Kadetsky, and GIGANTIC founder James Yeh. A former investment banker turned poet, Victoria Chang reads from The Boss (published in part on The Margins!), a poetry collection whose associative and unpunctuated poems reflect on issues of hierarchy and control, labor and power. Time Inc. counsel Helen Wan reads from The Partner Track: A Novel, in which a young Chinese American woman lawyer finds herself at odds with Big Law office culture.
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Who wouldn’t want to move to Paris? That’s what Ann Man, the author of the novel Kitchen Chinese, thought when her husband was given a diplomatic assignment to Paris—until after they moved in and he was suddenly called away to a year-long post in Iraq. Her memoir, Mastering The Art of French Eating, tells a Julie and Julia-style story about how Ann carved out a life for herself in France, cooking one French dish at a time. She’ll be joined by Monique Truong, a former food columnist for the 旋风加速器app官网 T Magazine and the author of Bitter in the Mouth, a southern novel in which the protagonist possesses synaesthesia—the ability to taste words. Her first novel, The Book of Salt—which won awards from the NYPL, AAWW, and PEN—told the story of Gertrude Stein’s kitchen from the point of view of her Southeast Asian chefs. Ava Chin, whose memoir, Eating Wildly, is forthcoming in 2014, discussed urban foraging, the subject of her column for The New York Times City Room blog. Moderated by Amazon Publishing editor Katie Salisbury.
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The United States is often called "a country of immigrants," but such platitudes often obscure the hidden multi-racial histories of immigration in the US. Writer Carolina Gonzalez--Senior Producer of NPR’s Latino USA, which will air segments of this panel--moderates an eye-opening conversation about the subterranean history of the United States. Vivek Bald reads from Bengali Harlem, his historical account that weaves together a century of archival research about the South Asian sailors who landed in Harlem in the early 20th Century and married into the Black and Latino community. Gaiutra Bahadur, author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, tells the story of two Indo-Guyanese diasporas: first, the tale of two diasporas: first, the first mass-migration from India of more than 1.2 million indentured laborers, beginning nearly two centuries ago to Guyana and more than a dozen other sugar-growing colonies worldwide; and second, the more recent migration from the Caribbean to New York in the last 50 years. Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, Raquel Cepeda is the author of Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, a vibrant, lyrical memoir about her estranged relationship with her family and her quest to search for her roots via DNA testing that revealed her complex multi-racial ethnicity.
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A thrilling line-up of emerging writers reads coming of age stories with a more surreal edge. In Yang-Sze Choo’s The Ghost Bride, a young woman is approached to become the bride of a dead man’s ghost. Set in colonial Malaysia and the Chinese afterlife, this debut novel has been praised for its wild depiction of the "sumptuous world of Chinese émigré culture and the love story that flows under it all--the kind so full of longing, the pages practically sigh as you turn each one," (Book of the Week - Oprah.com). NAAACP Image Award winner Justin Torres reads from We The Animals, a groundbreaking debut novel written in the first person plural from the point of view of "the communal howl of three younger brothers" (The New Yorker). Author of Sons And Other Flammable Objects and frequent contributor to the 旋风加速器xf5app, Porochista Khakpour re-imagines Persian mythology in her forthcoming second novel The Last Illusion, about a feral boy raised by a bird. Moderated by Melville House Managing Editor Wah-Ming Chang.
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Welcome to the only literary awards ceremony with projections on the walls, live poster printing, an interactive food art installation, and personalized Tarot Card readings by one of the most promising novelists in New York, Alexander Chee. Get a free poster supporting migrant rights, screenprinted on the spot by undocuqueer artist Felipe Baeza. The space will also feature GIGANTIC art editor Allison Kuo’s performance installation “Colorful Food,” a faux-carnival booth and free-standing snack machine that mixes the aesthetics of the vending machine, fortune-teller, and grade-school science fair project. Come for a dance and a drink, stay for the funky interactive art.
Before all this happens, we’ll host the 15th Asian American Literary Awards, where we recognize the best 2011 titles in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—as well as our surprise Member’s Choice winner! Poet Jennifer Hayashida presents the poetry award to Janine Oshiro for Pier, a fragmented and ethereal collection of landscape poems. Novelist Brian Leung presents the nonfiction award to Rahul Mehta, whose short story collection Quarantine charts the melancholic and cross-cultural conflicts of young LGBT Desi love. Roya Hakakian will receive the nonfiction award for her riveting book Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (a New York Times Notable Book), which recounts the assassination of eight Iranian and Kurdish opposition leaders in a Berlin restaurant—a killing that crucially shifted the relationship between Europe and Iran.
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